


The Glorious Resurrection of Bouvet Island

by ckret2



Series: Red Sprite & the Golden Ones (Rodorah slowburn oneshots) [17]
Category: Godzilla (2014), Godzilla - All Media Types, Godzilla: King of The Monsters (2019)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Everyone Lives/Nobody Dies, Empath Ghidorah, Huddling For Warmth, M/M, Mild Hurt/Comfort, Post-Canon, Rodan: acts badass; almost dies, Slow Burn, Volcanoes, Worldbuilding, of the "if the KOTM novel says Rodan can set off volcanoes I'm gonna explain HOW" variety, very bad science about volcanoes based on real science about volcanoes
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-12
Updated: 2019-12-12
Packaged: 2021-02-25 22:15:41
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,412
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21772807
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ckret2/pseuds/ckret2
Summary: Things that Rodan currently regrets, in order from least to most: Ghidorah can’t fly due to a wing injury; Rodan’s about to freeze solid; it’s their third night in the Antarctic; and due to some out-of-date information on the active volcanoes in the region, they’ve accidentally stranded themselves on a glaciated rock that hasn’t seen flowing lava in so long it’s forgotten what lava looks like. In a situation like this, there’s really only one logical thing Rodan can do:Harass the volcano until either it goes off or he dies.Easy!
Relationships: King Ghidorah/Rodan
Series: Red Sprite & the Golden Ones (Rodorah slowburn oneshots) [17]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1476800
Comments: 6
Kudos: 97





	The Glorious Resurrection of Bouvet Island

**Author's Note:**

> Originally posted to tumblr Sept 9.
> 
> This is part of an ongoing series of Rodorah one-shots. If you don’t wanna read the others, all you need to know is: They’ve just spent like three days in the Antarctic circle and Rodan Is In Frosty Ice Hell; Ghidorah’s wing is currently shredded, so they stopped at a volcanic island to repair it only to find the volcano is iced over; Ghidorah’s an empath (telepathically transmits/detects emotions) but it only works with head-to-head contact; he doesn’t speak any Earth languages but is slowly learning Rodan’s; and Rodan goes by Nido and doesn’t refer to anyone by their canon names because his species names people based on the volcano/island/geological feature they call home.

"Aw, gross," Nido muttered, looking down at the trail of ashes he was leaving behind. He lifted a wing, shook it, and watched with distaste as more gray dust floated out of the pores that were supposed to be dripping lava and fire. No wonder he couldn't feel his wing tips. He flapped a couple of times, trying to warm himself up. It didn't help. It just shed more ash on the ice.

He needed to get home. He was going to freeze solid if he didn't warm up soon. His blood was going to turn to stone and here he'd stay, an extremely impressive bird statue on the world's loneliest island.

But going home would mean abandoning the golden ones. And if _Nido_ was cold, they had to be three-fourths of the way to a popsicle. What if they needed his help?

The golden ones had worked late into the night, cracking their way through the glacier to the old caldera buried underneath; and as the temperatures had plummeted through the night, Nido had circled the island a few times to keep his magma moving. Nido wanted to help, but he didn't know if he was still warm enough to melt the ice without icing himself. Each time he returned from a flight, he chipped and pecked ineffectively at the ice until he couldn't stand the cold anymore, and took off again.  


He was amazed at the progress the golden ones were making. The frigid conditions didn't seem to slow them down at all. Even with their injured wing. He wondered how they could stand it.

By the time Nido returned near dawn, they'd dug their way down to the caldera and were scraping the last of the ice out of the way as he landed. It was a relief to have dry ground under his talons, even if it wasn't much warmer than the glacier.

"Good," they said, glancing over him. The middle head's gaze lingered on him a little more sharply, taking in the dark edges of his wings. Embarrassed, he tried to fold them so that the edges weren't as visible. Yeah, he was looking ugly, he knew it.

"You—you, nest—" They looked down at the caldera under their feet, tails lashing back and forth in annoyance as they searched for useful words. And then—startling Nido into hopping back—they flung their wings up, sparks crackling at the tips, and did a remarkably accurate impression of the sound of a volcano erupting.

Nido squawked in delight. "Erupt," he said. 

"You erupt nest. Yes, no?"

Nido looked at the caldera, tapped it with his talons, bent low to listen to it. Damn, this volcano probably hadn't been fit to be a nest since before Nido was born. It still had a spark of life to it, though—and knocking a glacier off the top of it had helped reduce some of the pressure keeping it sedated. He _could_ crack open a volcano like this—in minutes if he was incredibly lucky, weeks if he wasn't, but most likely a few days. He wasn't warm enough to keep at it for several days, though.

He'd have to try anyway. The golden ones needed to warm up. They couldn't sit here alone and wait until Nido flew to an already-active volcano to recover some of his strength. 

"Maybe," he said. At least he could try. If he failed—and didn't exhaust himself in the effort—he'd have no choice but to find somewhere to recover and come back as fast as possible. Hopefully he could at least stir up the volcano enough to crack open a couple of vents; that could help heat the golden ones a little. "You—sit there." He kicked a rock up and headbutted it onto the ice. The golden ones had to move carefully to avoid straining their injured wing, but they managed to climb out of the crater they'd created in the glacier and sat on top of it, watching.

Nido took off.

Those who watched his kind at work had a lot of misconceptions about how they set off volcanoes. Many thought it was their heat that did it, as they swooped low and snapped their flame-streaking wings down over closed calderas. Some even thought it was actual magic: a ritualistic dance used to awaken a sleeping mountain and call its magma to the surface. He had been told by those old enough to have met others of his kind that many of them _did_ treat it like a sacred dance. He understood. There was, indeed, something spiritual in the act—something sublime—something that made him feel connected to the Earth down to its very core.

But the actual ability to set off a volcano wasn't magic, and it didn't come from fire. It came from air and stone.

Nido's wings were strong enough that he could launch himself from his nest at dawn, circle the planet, and arrive home before solar noon. They were strong enough to strip trees from their soil, leaving vast acres flattened with their roots stretching higher than their branches. And, when he dove from far above the clouds, pulling himself down toward the Earth with his wings as though trying to crash, flattening his wings against his back as he reached his top speed, flying so fast that he couldn't breathe, so fast he couldn't see, so fast that he had to know the precise moment to spread his wings before he'd even broken through cloud cover because by the time he saw his target it would be too late to save himself—when he was flying that fast, his wings were strong enough that the wind from his downstroke beat on the surface of a caldera so hard it vibrated like a drum, making the earth shake and crack. 

The first time he dove, in the split second during which he was turning around and sound had a brief opportunity to catch up with him, he heard a thousand fractures in the glacier as the island beneath it flexed. He shot upward again.

The stone piled on top of magma kept it pressed down, pressurized, waiting to explode. If you were careful—if you were an expert—you could agitate the earth over a pocket of magma enough to make the stone weighing it down crack apart and move aside. Do it long enough and do it right, and the magma will burst free. Simple. The hardest part was getting the timing right so you didn't crash into the ground; but Nido had been born knowing how to do it. The rest was just repetition, until just the right rocks cracked in just the right ways.

Flames sputtered through the ashes trailing from his wings as he soared up again. He felt dizzy. As he reached the apex of his flight, he leaned back, spread his wings, shut his eyes, and for the briefest moment hung in midair, feeling the sun warming his cold chest.

And then he rolled backward and was diving again. And then again.

The third time he dove, he could hear a rumbling that he didn't think was caused by his latest downstroke. Promising. Maybe he was going to get lucky. He hoped so—he couldn't feel most of his body anymore. Trying to wake a volcano in his condition was dangerous.

As he tried to climb again, his vision went dark. For a second, he was unconscious; he woke up in freefall, wings dragging limply through the air. He could hear the golden ones' cries.

He couldn't stop when he was this close. He climbed again.

The fourth time he dove, he glimpsed the golden ones as a blur at the edge of the caldera—were they trying to reach him? They'd have to wait until he was done. The glacier had retreated, melting down with his attacks. Good. The reduced weight and extra water would also help the volcano wake up.

The fifth time he dove, he saw their lightning carving up the surface of the caldera.

He wasn't sure—he was fading fast, and at the fastest point in his dive he was falling at over thirteen thousand feet per second—but for a moment, he could have swore he saw rocks floating.

This time, he knew the ground shattered beneath his wings. He knew the volcano was awake.

He wheeled up, crossing the clouds one last time to slow himself, and then spiraled down to land next to the golden ones. The island rumbled beneath them, and the ground was already blessedly warm. He could see the last of the glacier tumbling into the ocean in chunks or seeping melted into the earth.

The golden ones _had_ helped, hadn't they? Nido was sure they had. "Thanks," he said. And then he sagged sideways against them, dizziness overtaking him again. He wondered what it meant that their scales didn't feel cold anymore.

The first stones and sparks rolled out of the resurrected volcano.

###

When he woke up, he was half sunk into a pool of thin, runny lava, with the golden ones crouched in the pool beside him, staring intently.

The moment they saw he was awake, the middle head jerked forward to inspect Nido and the other two jerked back to give Nido space, ending up with their necks awkwardly stretched apart. "Nido good?" the middle one asked, voice strained. They reached a wing toward him, paused, pulled it back, and settled it on one of the higher rocks just above the lava. "Not bad? Are you— you—?" They made some complicated gesture with a wing and their tails. Nido blinked dazedly at it. It took him a moment to realize they were using their tails to point at the gashes he'd ripped in their right wing. Trying to ask if he was injured?

"I'll be fine," he groaned. "Just... need a minute." How long had he been out? Not more than a couple of moments, surely. The volcano had had enough time to ooze out a fair-sized lava pool—"Oh, gross. _Mafic_."—a fair-sized lava pool that stank to high heaven; but he could still hear stones creaking below as the volcano tried to figure out how to flow again.

"What?"

"Good," Nido clarified. "Back to good... soon." He was exhausted.

The golden ones finally settled back, still watching him intently. The one on their right looked away first; the other two slowly lowered, unevenly, looking at him from different heights. "Us— We..." Whatever they wanted to say, they didn't have the words for it yet. They hissed and muttered together, then gave up and waded deeper into the caldera.

As Nido watched, they stretched in the warm lava, spreading their wings, arching their necks—and then, to his alarm, bent forward and shuddered in pain—and then, so impossibly fast he thought the cold might be playing tricks with his eyes, the tattered gashes torn in their injured wing knitted themselves shut. A thin film stretching out from the corners of the rip, pulling the hanging flaps back into place, fusing them into a whole again. Nido blinked, trying to dispel the mirage. But there it remained: a perfectly whole membrane where a vicious wound used to be.

"What— How—?" He gaped at the golden ones' wing, then looked up at their faces.

Just in time for the middle head to push his forehead against Nido's shoulder, pressing him deeper into the lava. After a moment he pulled back, but only to press their foreheads together.

And as usual, the emotions tumbled forth from the golden one's mind into Nido's: the golden one was so afraid it almost made Nido nauseous. Guilt cut a jagged crack through his mind—a sharp, unfamiliar sensation. Not unfamiliar to _Nido_ ; _he_ knew guilt, but it was smaller and softer than this, it could be dulled or brushed away. But he could feel its unfamiliarity to the golden one.

This nausea, this mind-shattering crack—was that because of _him?_ Just because he'd worn himself out a bit?

Having that fear and guilt pressed into his mind was making _him_ feel afraid and guilty. Nido tried to comfort the middle one, whistling a high soothing note, sliding their foreheads apart so he could run his beak beneath the middle one's horns and between the spines on his upper neck.

And then their left one pressed to Nido's forehead, desperately, eagerly; his guilt and fear were smaller, almost numb, but his mind was overrun with an aching _yearning_. There was love in this one too, Nido discovered—this was the first time he'd felt the left one's mind—but it was nothing like the oversized, sudden, fragile thing that had bloomed inside the middle's mind; this one's love was something old, threadbare, worn away but for a few iron-hard strands. Something suffocating in the dark.

There was a wordless plea in his mind, so Nido turned, whistling the same high note to him and giving his horns and spines the same attention.

The golden ones shuddered so hard that Nido, pressed between two of their heads, trembled too. They dragged themselves closer to him, pressed their smooth chest against his, and curled their wings loosely around him, leaving just enough room that he could back out if he wanted.

Despite the lava, Nido still felt frozen through to the bone; but with their wings around him, trapping in the rising heat, he felt just a bit warmer.

He thought he understood why they kept wanting to wrap him up now.

He pressed closer to them. Even if it was _far_ too soon for them to touch each other like this, he wanted their warmth.

They closed their wings tight around him, slid their heads over his shoulders and down his back. He continued nuzzling and grooming their spines, moving down their necks.

It took him a while to notice that the middle head had started copying the whistle he'd used to comfort them, letting out a single endless note at the exact same pitch. Then the other two joined in, turning it into a high, trilling, reverberating sound, an " _ii-lii-lii-lii-lii_." The sound got into his head, made him feel like he was floating. Made him feel like he was in the safest place in the universe.

And so surrounded—by wings, by warmth, by alien singing—he slipped into sleep.

**Author's Note:**

> Original post available on [tumblr](https://ckret2.tumblr.com/post/187594976987/the-glorious-resurrection-of-bouvet-island). Comments/reblogs there are very welcome (as are comments here)!


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